Originally Posted by
Steve M
This seems a little silly. One obvious way this whole scenario could happen is that Amex has the wrong SSN listed for her on her account, and the person associated with that other SSN died. She called Amex, Amex attempted to confirm the entire SSN, but the cardholder didn't want to do that. Yet, she is very distraught over the whole thing. I understand people wanting to be cautious over their SSN, but some amount of reason has to be applied: when dealing with an institution that already has it (hopefully, accurately), and you're sure you're dealing with them directly (such as by calling the number on the back of the card), and the whole reason you're calling them might be caused by an SSN mix-up, it seems to me that confirming the entire SSN makes a whole lot of sense.
I have to give her a break,
being over 85 years old, she obviously is not as clear-minded as folks on this forum. Yeah, she is a silly senior.
Just remember we would all get to that age some day. I would be grateful if I would still stay sharp-minded. lol.
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
Indeed it's possible that a card issuer has a mismatch between the SSA number and a person, one that could persist for even forever until the number shows up on the SSA master death file and/or the number from the file gets tied to a name.
A growing number of financial intermediaries use reputation searches (and firms for such) to figure out with whom they may want to cancel business-client relationships. I haven't heard of this involving online searches for people who have died, but it wouldn't surprise me if there eventually turns out to be some of that too. There have been situations where the underlying incident that causes a financial intermediary to sever a relationship also causes or comes with other hassles -- whether or not this latter dynamic is relevant to your acquaintance's situation.
See how banks use Ayasdi, ComplyAdvantage, and TransparINT. It's part of the cover-your-behind done by financial firms who want to show they are "strong" on KYC rules and anti-money-laundering rules. But some companies like this have been asked by card issuers/lenders to do things that increasingly look like help them "predict the future" or about more than looking just at the client's past with the company.
The card in question is a personal card. She does not own any business card. So the above seems to be irrelevant.